Known lately for its sleepy, leaping cats, Jaguar has taken its fangs off the nightstand and stuck them back in. The sporty “R” designation gets pinned to the tail of the pretty and still-pretty-new $52,000 XF, the mid-size sedan below the big XJ. The result: 510 tech-infused horsepower and a price hike to $80,000. The driving sophistication is high, and some test numbers we managed to quickly extract during the XFR’s introduction are 10 degrees north of wow: 4.3 seconds to 60 mph, a quarter-mile pierced in 12.7 seconds at 115 mph. The M5 flinches.
Jaguar likes to talk about root icons such as the shark-finned Le Mans D-types and the blaze of XK120 headlights on the rain-swept Italian roads of the Mille Miglia. Ah, cracking good stuff—buried under a manure pile of more recent mediocrity. Arriving in late June, the 2010 XFR, like the aluminum-bodied XKR coupe, which also receives the supercharged, 5.0-liter direct-injection V-8, is a solid start at redemption.
